Nevada Gothic: An Interview with Claire Vaye Watkins

“Battleborn,” the astonishingly wise début story collection by Claire Vaye Watkins, takes its title from the tattoo-worthy nickname of her home state, Nevada; the stories are set in the beautiful, treacherous territory of the desert, and are populated by characters drawn to its dry washes, their psychotic delusions or lucky-strike fantasies hazily glimmering before them.

Raw, fearless, and often very funny, these are stories remarkable for the risky dynamism of their language, the scope of their field of vision. The collection’s blistering opening, “Ghosts, Cowboys” merges the boom-time founding of Reno with the story of Watkins’s own family (her father, Paul Watkins, was once one of Charles Manson’s most trusted followers: a guitar-playing eighteen-year-old with Gram Parsons good looks, who lured girls to Spahn Ranch but broke away from the Manson family before the murders and provided key testimony for the prosecution; he died when Claire was a child). “Ghosts,” even as it concedes its own impossible weight (“But the story was too much, wherever I began: the borrowed revolver on the floor of a cabin near Bozeman, Montana … My parents’ own toxic and silver-gilded love”) can be read as a key to the rest of the book. Watkins works in the intersections between public history, private memory, and imagination, the known and the far more alluring unknown. In the desert, where abandoned buildings and ghost towns give way to movie sets, time and space can seem to shrink; Watkins’s narratives mimic this sense of elasticity and compression. The reader can sense her vital and deeply felt love for the place, for its wildness, “the grace and the violence.”

Written out of homesickness when Watkins was a student in the M.F.A. program at Ohio State University, away from Nevada for the first time, the stories spill out from the days when “Americans still had the brackish tastes of Sutter’s soil on their tongues, ten-year-old gold still glinting in their eyes” to the twenty-first century (a thirty-year-old woman, recalling her teen-age self luring a friend into a doomed night in a Vegas hotel room). My own introduction to Watkins’s work came via an early, plain galley of the book, its reread pages falling out, passed along by Joy Williams, among the writers (Joan Didion, Edward Abbey, Annie Proulx) to whom Watkins is earning comparisons. Recently, Watkins was awarded the Story Prize for “Battleborn”; in the same day she received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a finalist for the Young Lions Award, which will be announced today.

Watkins spoke to me on the phone from Pennsylvania, where she is an assistant professor at Bucknell University.

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The characters in “Battleborn” are denizens of the desert brothels, teen-agers, old-timer firework collectors, tourists lost in the desert, ranchers and rock hounds, miners and gamblers—a cast that make up an encompassing picture of the state. Did you ever feel any pressure to represent Nevada in a particular way? Did you go through your manuscript and say to yourself, “Oh wait, there’s a story missing here, something else I need to write”?

It wasn’t exactly like an obligation that I felt. Nevada is so weird that it would be impossible to say “I will capture Nevada,” and it’s just not in my disposition to say that I would represent its people. Also, Nevadans are not a people that appreciate being spoken for! It was more like a formal constraint, like a project I set out for myself, and I would start with the setting and say, “Where haven’t I set a story yet?” “What place is really dramatic and vivid and suggestive of drama?”—and then I would start to think who would live there and what would happen to them.

Eventually, I did get to a point where I knew I had one more story to go and there was a pretty long dry spell before that last story, “The Diggings,” the gold-rush story, because I was asking myself these questions, and it was the last one, so it had to kind of be the keystone. At that point I was thinking about my manuscript not as a bunch of stories but as a book—what does a book about the West mean now? I was thinking about this legacy of the gold rush and westward expansion. Other writers might not have approached it so literally, but I have always been enthralled with the history.

You’ve described your father’s story as for many years being your “parlor trick”—a kind of anecdote that I imagine you can feel a bit disassociated from in the retelling. But with “Ghosts, Cowboys,” you really take ownership of the story. After finishing it, did you feel “done” with that particular narrative?

The reason I was interested in engaging with it in fiction is because I can create this character, who happens to also be named Claire, who is able to find more significance in the story than I do. It’s a more impactful narrative in her life than it is in mine. So I can let her ask the questions the story ought to ask: Why is this story being told? Why should it matter? I don’t have any interesting answers for that. My own answers are like, Well, it doesn’t, really. I don’t think it’s that different from what your parents were doing when they were eighteen years old. But the fictional character can tease together all these threads in an honest way—we always talk about the truth that’s available in fiction versus in nonfiction—and that’s what I think it comes down to. For now, at least, I’ve felt like I’ve said all I need to say about it, fictionally or otherwise.

Now that the book is getting so much acclaim and attention, what is it like to be a writer with a public identity? Does any part of that parlor-trick feeling return?

When I meet certain readers, they’ll say, “Oh I love the way you write about that, I remember the moment, I remember seeing it on TV.” This woman told me about growing up in Los Angeles and how as a kid she used to actually play “Charlie and the Girls.” I’m glad to meet these people for whom the story has such meaning, but I always feel a little bit like a fraud. They’re telling me about their memories of this, and I have none; I mean, I’m twenty-nine years old.

Realistic fiction about the West tends to get called “gritty,” whereas, say, in the South it’s “gothic” or “grotesque.” How different are those regional labels, really?

It’s like what Flannery O’Connor said: what Northerners call grotesque, the Southerner will call realistic. I certainly never set out to be gritty or inflict on my reader a harrowing, difficult experience. I actually think of the stories as really funny and really pretty but my big fear for them is that they’re nostalgic, that they’re too affectionate, that they’re too safe. So to hear them described to me as gritty is really bizarre. But the other element of it is sometimes I do get, Oh this very dainty girl has written a very gritty book, and that’s probably my least favorite response to it; sometimes people have very strange responses to my age and gender and my photo— “You seem so nice in your picture, but then you’re writing about sex.” I want to say, “Hey, nice girls get there, too!”

Right, that you can write from the perspective of men and write “like a man” very well and write about sex.

Oh yeah, writing as a man! What a fascinatingly stupid idea. “Writing like a man”— are all my sentences really long and stiff or something? I don’t know what that means to write like a man.

The language in your stories is sharp and stunning and gripping and often very, very funny. Voices veer throughout the book, from the earnest, plaintive, confessional letters from a rancher to an address on a pill bottle to an equally lonesome, crass-talking male madam to the prospector brother plagued by dark, prophetic visions. Do you consciously research language when you’re writing, or do you arrive at it more instinctively?

First of all, I really am glad that you think it’s funny, because that’s not feedback I get a lot. I often get “psychopathic” or “you’re so harrowing,” and I think, Oh, lighten up! For me, the process of finding the voice, the tenor, the range, and all the stuff that comes along with language is a very conscious process. With “The Diggings,” I really wanted it to feel like we were in another time and in another world, so it shouldn’t sound like us but also it shouldn’t be cheesy. That was a conscious process of reading a bunch of letters and listening to the way the language would have been used. It’s not a historically accurate portrayal of the way speech was used in the eighteen-fifties, but more like replicating the sensation of it. For example, I spent some time with the idea that I could take the O.E.D. and only use words and phrases that definitely were in vogue and widely available for use in the eighteen-fifties, but then you find stuff like the phrase “what the hell,” which would be allowed but that obviously seems wrong. So it’s not about being correct but the feeling of correctness, of authority.

And with the other stories, would you do that, too?

I would—sometimes it would not be so conscious, but I always had the concept of a touchstone somewhere of the kind of language that I was after. I would literally have Joy Williams open on my desk next to me, and then Joy Williams plus Tim O’Brien: What would come from that? Or what if it was a Mary Gaitskill story written by Lee K. Abbott? At some point I got over my anxiety about being a copycat, which I used to have intensely. But now I think, I could do a lot worse than copying Mary Gaitskill; that’s fine. I surrendered those anxieties, and then my own thing was able to emerge from it because I was able to stop worrying whether I was doing cheap Flannery O’Connor.

And I always read the story hundreds of times. Every time I sit down to write, I start at the beginning and I read the story out loud. So by the time I’m down to my white space I’ve essentially trained my ear to figure out what the story is up to. Which I’m trying to do with my novel now, but it takes a long time to read two hundred pages every day.

You’ve described your mother as a “terrific bullshitter.” What about her storytelling has stayed with you?

My mom and my dad started this rock shop and museum on the edge of Death Valley, and I grew up in this place. They made jewelry, they made exhibits, and I could always play with them and touch them. So the process of curation I’ve always been aware of as a storytelling process, too—not that I could have articulated that when I was ten years old.

Probably the most impactful thing about my mom’s stories was their scope and the fact that they were being told in the car. If you live in a really remote part of the country, you have to drive long distances, and so her story of the tourist who got stranded on the dry lake bed is also the story of how the dry lake bed was formed in geologic time. There’s this interplay between the sweeping and the massive, macro-level kind of story of how the world came to be as we know it, but also the human story of here’s this person and here’s what their thirst felt like, and here’s what they might have been thinking and they would have seen these stars.

You can see that going on in the book, the movement between the human and the sublime. She told these stories with such authority even though they were not true and that seems obviously beside the point. The point wasn’t to educate us about how the dry lake bed was formed even though that was a part of it; there was a bigger ambition to the story, this more lyrical core of emotion and empathy, the sort of stuff that fiction does well, she was interested in, too.

Once, my mom lobbied Sonoma State University to return a mammoth that had been found in our town then, Shoshone, California. She got it returned to her museum and she did a lot of interpretive work about the mammoth—how it walked in the mud and it probably ate this and so on, like you do as a curator—but she wasn’t a paleontologist, or even a college graduate, she just thought that that seemed right. I went back and visited the local newspaper and they had this article about the museum, with this paleontologist-geologist correcting her, and you could tell she was just very bored with that, like, “All right, fine, whatever you need to do,” and I think that’s a good encapsulation of what her storytelling was like.

Rebecca Bengal’s stories and articles have appeared in “Best American Nonrequired Reading,” New York, Oxford American, and elsewhere.